71 years, actually, give or take. Works enter the public domain at the start of the year following the 70th anniversary of the author's death. Since Mr. Salinger has died in January, that adds almost another year to the wait.

I'm just really bummed that the man died, is all. I was holding on to some faint glimmer of hope that eventually he'd decide to publish his unpublished works. I wouldn't want to read them if they were published by his estate against his wishes. I assume that he's had it in his will not to publish them, but I don't know if the estate can decide otherwise...

I'm just really bummed that the man died, is all. I was holding on to some faint glimmer of hope that eventually he'd decide to publish his unpublished works. I wouldn't want to read them if they were published by his estate against his wishes. I assume that he's had it in his will not to publish them, but I don't know if the estate can decide otherwise...

Actually, at the risk of sounding callous, him being dead increases the chances of anything new from him being published.
In life he sure as hell wasn't going to let anything new be published. (We're talking about a timeframe of decades of self-imposed seclusion here.)